If Hillary Clinton’s latest book, “Hard Choices,” was not an obvious enough sign of her presidential aspirations, then her recent Washington Post review of Henry Kissinger’s new book, “World Order,” seems to have sealed the deal.

Peter Richardson and Chris Hedges took home the first and second place trophies, respectively, in the online critic category at the L.A. Press Club’s Sixth Annual National Entertainment Journalism Awards on Sunday.

Some 50 years after the infamous Milgram experiments, Australian psychologist Gina Perry writes, “The standard account ... suggests that ordinary people can be manipulated into behaving in ways that contradict their morals and values—that you or I could be talked into torturing a man. But could we?”

These four books are written in the shadow of the suspicion that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—concerning hard work, opportunity, meritocracy, achievement and social mobility—somehow no longer pertain.

Author Annalee Newitz is convinced that humans will survive a mass extinction, “because the world has been almost completely destroyed at least half a dozen times already in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, and every single time there have been survivors.”

This book’s vision of how things went bad over the past generation covers such diverse topics as the fast food-obesity nexus, the loss of localism, the end of cheap oil, the housing collapse and, above all, the death of trust.

A new book examines the House and Senate through the evolution of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and “Congress comes across as the nation’s grandfather: antiquated, inconsistent, as slow-moving as it is dull-witted.”

“Daily Rituals: How Artists Work,” which describes the routines of more than 150 creative people, including playwrights, composers, painters and writers, is a compact, quirky and frequently delightful book.

Cherilyn Parsons, in her Truthdig review of “The Orphan Master’s Son,” wrote that the book, which just won the Pulitzer Prize, is “a rich, careening, dystopian tale that stretches the form of a novel to give us a visceral hit of life inside North Korea.”

The details about the courts at Guantanamo Bay have remained sketchy. Until now, as a new book explains how a small group of Bush-era political appointees developed a parallel justice system designed to ensure a specific outcome.

“The ways capitalism works and does not work,” Robert McChesney writes in his new book, “determine the role the Internet might play in society. ... The problem is that [Internet] celebrants often believe digital technology has superpowers over political economy.”

MacDonald Harris is a writer “too good to be neglected,” writes Philip Pullman in the introduction to this reissue of Harris’ highly original 1976 novel “The Balloonist.” Set in 1897, it follows a middle-aged Swedish aeronaut as he aims to sail over the Arctic in a balloon to the North Pole.

Dave Zirin, in “Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down,” returns to his favorite topics: race, gender, unions, the corporatization and corruption of sports, and athletes willing to speak out on any of the above.

Oliver Sacks’ graceful and informative new book, “Hallucinations,” explores the surprising ways in which our brains call up simulated realities that are almost indistinguishable from normal perceptions.

Fedspeak, vague and convoluted answers to economic questions, was popularized by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. It allowed him to essentially say “no comment” without admitting that he was avoiding questions.

In “Stranger to History,” a memoir recounting Aatish Taseer’s travels through several predominantly Muslim countries, Pakistan emerges much worse after an attempt to “fix” it, a project that also eventually leads to the killing of the author’s father.

“Participation in the arts is a guarantor of other human rights because the first thing that is taken away from vulnerable, unpopular, or minority groups is the right to self-expression,” Francois Matarasso says in “Acting Together, Volume II.”

Mark Bowden’s “The Finish” reveals something you might not have known about the plan to kill Osama bin Laden: The Obama administration had considered a third option for taking out the al-Qaida leader—a sniper drone still under development.

Avery Arlington, the main character of the novel “Elsewhere, California,” is someone you know: the awkward, only black girl in class, the girl hanging out at the 7-Eleven magazine rack wishing she was anybody but herself, and the artist whose work makes you uncomfortable.

In Dave Eggers’ “A Hologram for the King,” an ordinary man comes to realize that managers like him who made outsourcing possible will be discarded as human refuse now that the globalization process is complete, left to wander like ghosts among the ruins.

Maureen N. McLane’s deeply personal and eccentric “My Poets” is a meditation on the works that have “most marked” her by Chaucer, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Emily Dickinson, Shelley and Louise Gluck.

“Subversives” shows how the two men and their allies sabotaged the careers of law-abiding citizens, defended reckless police violence and exploited an appalling double standard in the political use of FBI intelligence.

Lopez Lomong had never heard of the games when he tagged along with friends in Kenya to watch the 2000 Sydney races on a grainy, black-and-white TV powered by a car battery. Now, he’ll run the 5,000-meter for the U.S. in London.

“Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times” tells the stories of unlikely dissenters who were not radicals, but rather ordinary people compelled to act when the system they believed in went terribly wrong.

Jonathan Haidt, who believes we are hard-wired to be selfish, mistakes conformity and obedience to authority for the moral life in his new book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.”

If you’re wondering how $31 billion of U.S. taxpayer money could be lost to fraud and waste in Afghanistan and Iraq, “Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban” by Douglas A. Wissing is for you.

When Bootsy Collins defected from James Brown’s band for George Clinton’s, RJ Smith, in his new biography of Brown, gives us the desertion from Brown’s point of view: “You could not copyright a beat, a smell, the One. You made it and then a younger man in an ass-length blond wig marked it up and made it new.”

In “Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture,” Diana Senechal argues that the omnipresence of computers, tablets and smartphones hampers our ability to commune not just with one another, but with ourselves.